In a puzzling move -- since consumers have already been complaining about the high price of pubs on the iPad -- Condé Nast just raised prices for tablet versions of GQ and Vanity Fair, to $4.99 an issue (that's $2 and $1 more respectively), according to All Things Digital. The company says the change is part of its move to a different digital publishing system. Meanwhile, to boost sales of the iPad version of Glamour -- the first of the three pubs to shift to the new platform -- Condé cut prices to 99 cents an issue. Go figure.

No one, except for other journalists, writes Jack Shafer in an amusing Slate piece analyzing a new practice at the New York Times Magazine, starting this Sunday: putting an editor credit at the end of features. Shafer claims it's just a ploy for new editor Hugo Lindgren to call attention to the redesign of the magazine. And as for the pub's adding email addresses to the masthead, "I'd be a lot more impressed if the addresses were the unpublicized @nytimes.com addresses Magazine staffers use all day long, and not all suffixed "MagGroup"... which indicates that they were specially ginned …

Art Scene and Visual Art Source have been contributing free editorial to Huffington Post since 2010 -- but no longer, says publisher Bill Lasarow, quoted in The Wrap. And Lasarow wants all other unpaid contributors to join him in the strike "and form a negotiating partnership with Huffington/AOL... so as to professionalize this relationship."

Is Al-Jazeera English, whose reps met last week with three U.S. cable operators, likely to achieve its goals of getting broader carriage in the U.S.? MarketWatch's David B. Wilkerson quotes Al Anstey, managing director of Al Jazeera English, who is hopeful that there is enough demand for the channel to make a strong case -- and an unnamed source, along with Andrew Tyndall, an analyst of television news, who are less hopeful. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, praised Al-Jazeera as offering "real news," as opposed to "a million commercials and, …

"The list of ethical landmines sports media behemoth ESPN has stepped on are legion, with new entries popping up with regularity," writes Eric Deggans on the Web site of the National Sports Journalism Center. In this long, thoughtful piece, Deggans analyzes the issues bedeviling "a sports media company that has entertainment in the first word of its name, employing both journalists and media personalities who occasionally commit acts of journalism."

Filling a gap left unfilled since another Russian-language daily went weekly and then ceased publishing in 2010, Reporter (the word is the same in both English and Russian), launched on Monday. Following the model of papers like AM New York, Reporter will be distributed free -- mostly in areas where Russian speakers leave and work, such as Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Besides the New York Times-New York mag turf war exemplified by New York's recent hiring of Times op-ed veteran Frank Rich, it seems there's another battle of news giants going on: the Gray Lady versus Bloomberg News. The latter recently poached three top Times editorial folk to start a new new opinion service, Bloomberg View, which the Times perceived as a threat -- and speeded up the time frame for the reinvention of its Week in Review section, announced last month.

The Federal Communications Commission paved the way to renew 315 TV license renewals by dismissing indecency complaints against over 6,000 programs at TV stations.

Seems yesterday's announcement of veteran New York Timesman Frank Rich's move to New York mag was also part of a larger game of oneupmanship the two pubs have been playing since September. Mediaweek's Dylan Byers analyzes the gameplay, which the Times had been winning before New York editor Adam Moss made the Rich score. More than just a pawn, Rich explains why he made the jump on the Women's Wear Daily/Media blog.  Telling quote: "As much as I love the Times, there was no way for me to reinvent myself at the Times."

In a Folio article, Bill Mickey discusses the role of data and audience development in content creation for print/digital publications, riffing off a post by Forbes' chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin that explains how the "top-down 'caste system' of traditional newsrooms has been outmoded by the way content is consumed and shared digitally." Probably some good points here, but we're struck by how thick the digital jargon is. There's no mention of writers, only "content creators" who must "optimize their production"; "editors determine what content resonates and [yep, cliche coming] drives engagement."